Florida issues amber alert after '15-year-old girl seen being pulled into SUV'

Police say she was last wearing a green polo and khaki pants

Clark Mindock
New York
Tuesday 15 May 2018 16:09 BST
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The Amber Alert was issued Tuesday morning
The Amber Alert was issued Tuesday morning

Florida police are searching for a teenage girl who was last seen being pulled into a large vehicle, according to a tweet.

Police have issued an amber alert — an American emergency response system that rapidly sends out information about missing people, generally children — for the girl, who is said to be a 15-year-old.

The tweet announcing the missing girl said that she was last seen Tuesday between 7.30am and 8.30 am in Titusville, Florida.

At that time, she was being pulled into a charcoal coloured SUV.

The 15-year-old was reportedly wearing a green polo and khaki pants, according to police. She has dreads, those officials said, and also has a single white stripe in her hair.

Police do not have license plate numbers for the vehicle that took the girl, but did say that it was a newer vehicle and it had a tyre on the back.

A photo of the teenager has not yet been released, and other details were withheld as well.

The FBI’s National Crime Information Centre Missing Person File says that there were 88.089 alive missing person records, including 32,121 of those being children under the age of 21, as of the end of last year.

The Department of Justice, in a study released in 2002 analysing data between the years 1997 and 1999, found that there were roughly 797,500 children reported missing every year during that period, including 203,900 who were abducted by a family member.

The Amber Alert system has been credited with the safe recovery of 897 children between 1997 and 2017.

Every state in the US have Amber Alert plans in place to help find children who are missing and potentially in danger. They are joined by Washington, and Puerto Rico.

The system was named in the honor of Amber Hagerman, who was murdered after being abducted in 1996.

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